VSTricks – Rory Becker highlights Scott Cate’s Blog where he has continued on from where Sara Ford left off with her visual Studio Tips series when it ended in December. A little over a year ago I was in a similar position to Scott, following on from a great series of posts by a well known name in the industry (In my case following on from the Daily Grind by Mike Gunderloy) Go Give him some support.

True Swiss don’t like mocks! – Gabriel Schenker explores the use of Mocks and Stubs in Test Driven Development looking at the differences between the two and showing them in use.

TDD: Test DRYness – Mark Needham talks about the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle in unit tests, and highlights a few techniques you can use to avoid repetition.

50% off All Manning Books for DZone Members – DZone have teamed up with Manning Publications to offer 50% off any purchase from the Manning books site. You will have to be quick though, the offer runs out on 3rd February

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European Virtual ALT.NET Meeting on 02/02/2009 – Jan Van Ryswyck announces the first European Virtual Alt.Net Meeting, to be held on 2nd February 2009, starting 7pm GMT. Greg Young will be talking about Domain Driven Design for the event. I’ve been wanting to check these events for a while (having listened to the recordings of the US ones) and I’m really glad that the event has been scheduled at a time that is more suitable for the UK.

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Hashing Algorithm Roundup – Beau Monday follows on from yesterdays encryption round up with a similar look at hashing algorithms.

.NET Circuit Breakers – Tobin Harris looks at the concept of a Circuit Breaker in programming, and highlights the Lokad Shared Libraries which contain nice implementations of the Circuit breaker along with code for handling exceptions, retries, etc in an elegant way.

Controlling Time – Patrick Kua looks at how you can provide time based tests with times you want by insulating your dependency on the actual time

Parameter Order Should Be Consistent – Brendan Enrick writes about an annoyance I also discovered the other day about a lack on consistency in parameter order between some common (and related) exception constructors.

Long division – Eric Lippert explores why when dividing an int by a long returns a long.

Tales from High Memory Scenarios: Part 2 – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series on High memory use, looking further into the problems encountered, and talks about the use of the debugger to inspect what was going on.

Much Ado About Monads – Maybe Edition – Matthew Podwysocki attempts to explain what Monads are and why we should care about them, exploring the origins in Haskell, and looking at implementations in F#

Anonymous Methods, Lambdas, Confusion – Mike Taulty looks at the evolution of the language support for anonymous methods and lambda expressions, working from first principles through to the format we have available now.

User Experience Changes since Beta 2 – The Internet Explorer team talk about some of the User Interface refinements based on user feedback that went into the latest release of Internet Explorer 8 (RC1)